When your shiny new software that promised to save the company millions of dollars in efficiencies is greeted by a series groans and frowns, you have a problem.
Why? Because today’s iPhone-driven culture dictates simplicity. Is your software easy to use?
Anything more than two clicks away is like trying to find the hottest restaurant in town using a compass and a hand-drawn map.
According to a Deloitte [1] consultancy, your users should be able to execute 50% of their daily tasks directly from the home screen. They should not be more than two clicks away from the other 40% of their daily tasks.
The cost of poor software design cost the US economy more than $3.1 trillion a year [2].
Where could this money be going?
The Land of Lost Productivity
If applications are hard to use, employees will lag with engagement and, worst yet, may avoid using the application entirely.
If an employee wakes up every morning dreading logging in and using your applications what are the chances they have indeed.com job alerts on their phone?
The Island of Opportunity Death
What prospective customers have you failed to attract to your business due to software usability issues?
Did they find your software cumbersome? Worse yet, you never reached that stage because your sales rep couldn’t be bothered to enter prospect details into your clunky CRM.
The Valley of Unhappy Customers
If your customers aren’t happy with your software, they – like your employees – will wander off like lost children never to be seen again.
So where is your ROI with new software? Nowhere.
Do you remember the spreadsheet calculations your vendor showed you that your new system would pay for itself in three years due to the new applications? If your people aren’t using it, you may just as well have burned your money.
At Infolog, we believe in the art of simplicity when it comes to our supply chain and logistics software suite.
People ask me, “Well Richard, I don’t want a simple solution, our business is complex.”
It is true that business requirements can be highly complex. My reply is we deliver a simple user interface as part of a sophisticated software application.
This is where the challenge lies, and many software companies fail because it’s more difficult to build a simple user interface than a complex one.
A user interface is typically designed to present a set of data and actionable items to a user. The less labour intensive UX design methodology spends little time on tailoring the data presentation and allowed actionable items. Everyone sees everything. Regardless if they can action it or not. The result is confusing and hard to use software. Tailoring the data presented and the actions available by current operational environment and user or role is much more challenging. But this design methodology provides for superior software usability.
At Infolog, we gently infuse technology in a way to simplify the end-user experience.
The result is streamlined workflows and tailored information visibility.
Simply put, if the end user’s life is simpler, we are all happier. (And more productive).
Contact Infolog today to find out more.
Links
[1] https://deloitte.wsj.com/cio/2012/09/10/enterprise-software-why-the-user-experience-matters/ [2] https://hbr.org/2016/09/bad-data-costs-the-u-s-3-trillion-per-year/